1. Technical Field
This application relates generally to providing computer services in a timely and economical manner by managing the initialization of monitoring and management software. More specifically, the application relates to a system, method, and software to quickly determine the configuration of a server, to receive and install monitoring and management components, if needed, and to manage initialization and configuration of the monitoring/management agents as necessary.
2. Description of Related Art
The management of computer resources in a company can involve large amounts of time and energy. Any time an employee is added, moved, or dropped, the system must be updated to reflect the desired availability of resources to each person. Additionally, files grow larger in both size and complexity, software is updated, and hardware is added or replaced. To automate the process, several vendors offer management systems that manage a wide variety of hardware and software resources according to stated policies. In a typical management system, various agents, or programs, act within a given infrastructure to monitor and provide management instructions to the resources present. As policies change or a patch is made available, a systems administrator works through the management system to provide the updates automatically to all affected servers.
There can be a number of instances when it is desirable to change the monitoring/management programs utilized on a system, such as after a merger, acquisition, or outsourcing of a system. Updates of existing management programs or the availability of new management programs may also create the impetus for change. Such a change requires the systems administrator to know what resides on a system to provide the proper configurations and settings. In some instances, the systems administrator may also need to determine the best management or monitoring programs to serve their needs. Performing discovery, installation, and setup on the new system can be tedious and difficult if done manually, particularly in very large, complex systems. Furthermore, choosing the best among the numerous available management programs can require a great deal of knowledge. Consequently, it requires a great deal of time to acquire such knowledge on the part of the already busy, time constrained systems administrator.
The advent of grid computing as only exacerbated the problem. It is nearly impossible for the system administrator to know what applications are on what system at a given point of time as the grid is so dynamic. Even after a scan of the resident applications, the scan becomes “stale” in a matter of hours and of limited utility.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an automated means for discovering the programs, and in particular the monitoring and management programs, on the machines in a distributed computing system and for automatically installing and configuring monitoring and management programs.